How has COVID-19 changed what we eat? Tweets-reflected Food Consumption During the Pandemic.

Keywords: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), Dietary Health, Food, Obesity, Social Communication
Session Type: Virtual Poster Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 57

Abstract

According to the American Psychological Association's annual "Stress in America" report, the Covid-19 pandemic is a significant stressor for many Americans, with more than 40% saying they have gained undesired weight since the start of the pandemic. Restaurant closures, quarantine policies and work-from-home lifestyles during the pandemic may affect dietary choices.

Twitter is a popular social media platform for people to share activities, opinions, and feelings while disseminating dietary information. To some extent, you tweet what you eat. We examine and identify spatiotemporal patterns of tweets related to food and diet. Using a search term index based on the IFSAC food categorization scheme, we collect food-related tweets from January 2019 to January 2022. We geocode the tweets to the state level. We apply temporal, content, and geographical analyses to investigate when, where, and what people talked about different foods. Utilizing the Latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm (LDA) and NCR’s sentiment analysis methods, we propose a preliminary understanding of the evolution of topics on social media before and during the pandemic.

Preliminary findings revealed the trend of local food insufficiency. We further relate the caloric values of the foods mentioned in the tweets to the state-wide obesity rates, exploring correlation analysis across the US. Our results demonstrate that people's concerns about dietary choices and obesity risks are negatively correlated with the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic. Health promotion should pay more attention to people’s health consciousness about eating choices during health crises at individual and community levels.